


Silence of a Berceuse, and All Love Entails

by HatchetNoseGelphie



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: F/F, all curled up in her waverly's lap, and waverly is very in love with her snuggly sheriff, and why she loves nicole, completely oblivious to the 2k words of waverly thinking and reflecting, everything else is the same though, it's not such a hard thing maybe, musings in the middle of the night, nicole is a sleepy little lesbian, slight au where i said fuck the ending of season three, waverly ponders what it means to love someone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24725245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HatchetNoseGelphie/pseuds/HatchetNoseGelphie
Summary: In the aftermath of Bulshar, Waverly reflects on what it means to love Nicole, and why she does.
Relationships: Waverly Earp & Nicole Haught, Waverly Earp & Wynonna Earp, Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught
Comments: 2
Kudos: 89





	Silence of a Berceuse, and All Love Entails

**Author's Note:**

> No, I didn't spend literally every minute of my work shift earlier thinking about this very one-shot and planning it, counting down the seconds until I was able to come home and work on it. No, I'm not a sappy hopeless romantic who thinks too much and believes that sunrises are more beautiful than sunsets. No, I don't have any problems whatsoever with how season three ended.
> 
> Stop accusing me smh.

It wasn’t such a hard thing, maybe, thought Waverly as she ran her fingers absently through soft red locks.

When her father had asked her what she liked about Nicole, she had been sure it was a loaded question. She had been sure that the only question harder to answer would be why she loved Nicole. Life had a funny way of making you _know_ these things but giving you no way of knowing why they’re so, much less describing why they’re so. Sometimes, you just have to let the intuitive thing beating in your chest take a shot and hope it didn’t miss terribly. There were no other words to describe the leap of faith that Waverly had taken when she’d set her lips on a collision course to Nicole’s in that office.

She had spent her life planning ahead, preparing for every eventuality. By the time she was eight, she had a whole, fourteen-year plan for her life. She had even accounted for the revenants that her daddy put down coming back to Purgatory when Wynonna turned twenty-seven. Of course, that’s when the details of her fourteen-year plan had gotten a little foggy, since certain circumstances simply _couldn’t_ be foreseen, like dangling from a noose as Wynonna tried to kill the revenants before she suffocated. Still, she did her damnedest to make sure she had a plan for every single thing that could possibly be thrown her way. She even had a majority of the revenants catalogued – she had spent years upon years of her life compiling files on them.

It was such a funny thought to her that she almost couldn’t suppress the bubble of laughter rising in her chest, that the one thing she had never been able to predict was Nicole. The way Nicole made her so flustered that day they met in Shorty’s. The way she could make Waverly’s heart soar and clench at the same time. She lamented for the lame answers she had given her father’s so-called impossible question, for there were many more things that she liked about Nicole.

She felt, if she was given more time, she could build a four hundred slide presentation on what she liked about Nicole, with at least twelve slides dedicated to her dimples and at least fifty dedicated to the ways that Nicole would smile. Fifty more dedicated to the ways that Nicole would make _her_ smile. No, scratch that, a hundred dedicated to the ways Nicole made her smile.

Maybe four hundred slides wouldn’t be enough, she reflected.

It was a complicated question. _Why do you love her?_ While that wasn’t what Julian had asked, it was certainly what some cruel, sadistic part of Waverly deigned to hear. It was certainly what she hadn’t been able to get out of her head in the following hours, even as Wynonna offed the snake and Doc redeemed himself. Since then, the three of them had trudged back through the woods, back to the Homestead, where Waverly and Nicole got to talking again, and Nicole gave her answer.

_Why do I love you?_

She glanced down at the beauty laying perpendicular to her with her nose mere inches from Waverly’s stomach. As if on cue, Nicole shifted slightly and let out a sleepy sigh, but otherwise remained unconscious. Waverly moved her hand from silky red hair and gently ghosted her thumb over a defined cheekbone – the one she could see, anyway. She traced up to Nicole’s temple, across her hairline, down the bridge of her nose, past her lips, to her chin, and then up her jawline to her ear, peeking cutely out of her short hair.

Waverly felt like people were too complex, sometimes. People hid away parts of themselves and showed more than one face. They loved and hated and healed and hurt at the same time. They pushed and pulled in a way that any vengeful god that may or may not exist would be impressed by. People were empathic, which meant not only that they knew how to help others but also that they knew how to harm them, too. The ugly side of empathy was disgust and hatred and bias, and people drifted lazily, like sleepy bees in the morning, from the pretty side to the ugly side, just as the bees would in and out of their hive.

People were just too complex. Everyone wanted to be so unique and so different that they all ended up the same anyway. There was too much complex in the world and not enough simple, and that’s part of what made Nicole stand out so brashly against the crowds. It wasn’t her flaming red hair or her openness about her sexuality or even the way that she could flirt without even trying. It was the way that Nicole was content to be simple. How Nicole was happy being Just Nicole.

Even with her own traumatic past. A past that she didn’t bother to bring up to anyone until it became relevant. Until it became necessary. That sort of hurt, Waverly realized. It hurt that Nicole didn’t tell her, but at the same time, it didn’t, because she understood that there was no malintent involved, and it was Nicole’s simplicity that chose to bury it somewhere far behind her rather than let it haunt her twenty years after the fact.

Waverly was a complex person. She knew this. She wasn’t complex in the way that she tried to be different and ended up just another part of the herd, but she was complex in the way that she too often made plans for herself that didn’t involve anything she actually wanted. She had been surprisingly willing, upon giving it some thought and rationalizing both paths, to sacrifice her own life for the good of everyone she loved in the world – everyone in the world period. It certainly wouldn’t have been the most convenient or survivalist option for her to sacrifice herself and be turned to stone to stop the snake, but it was one that, rationally, she _understood_. It was logical. One life to save many, as Kevin had pointed out.

But Wynonna said no. Wynonna said no, and there was no way that Waverly could defy Wynonna. No way she could, in good faith, tear away the one decent thing in Wynonna’s life. It wasn’t out of her own self-preservation that she decided not to sacrifice herself. It was out of concern for her sister.

Julian died, though. Julian died, and it wasn’t lost on her that she’d hardly gotten to know him at all. It wasn’t lost on her, either, that there was still so much more to Nicole that she didn’t know. Her eyes slid down to Nicole’s left hand, braced against Waverly’s arm, and the big, black ring sitting on the third finger. Maybe it was hysteria that made Waverly propose, because if she knew anything at all, it was that she didn’t plan to propose. Not in the slightest. Marriage had always been in the plan for her and Nicole (the revised plan that she had put together once they were officially a couple), but it was more a distant speck in the future, set for when everything was calmed down and no more demons walked the earth.

She didn’t know what it was that prompted the hysteria in which she proposed. Maybe it had to do with what Wynonna had told her about Nicole being carried to the homestead by one vampiric Doc Holliday and nearly bleeding out in the barn. Maybe it had to do with the way that she watched the father she never knew she had, the father she should have had more time with, die before her very eyes and didn’t do jack shit about it. Maybe it even had to do with the way they’d buried Dolls mere weeks beforehand, and it felt like they were losing too many people too fast.

Whatever it was, it had made her decide, for once, not to be complex. She felt simple when she told Nicole that she loved her and put that dastardly ring – her _father’s_ ring – onto her finger. She felt simple and bare and vulnerable in a way that she wasn’t sure she’d ever felt before, and while conflicting thoughts ran through her head about it, she couldn’t shake the fact that the simplicity was _good_. It was _right_. Above all, it was _Nicole_.

Way back when Waverly had only just started to let Nicole in, she had only just started to let them be together, she had confessed to loving Nicole. Right there. In front of Nicole, Wynonna, and Willa. She had thought it would be difficult – after all, her and Nicole hadn’t really discussed what they _were_ by then. She remembered the way her breath hitched in her throat and she wasn’t convinced she’d be able to say them, _but then_ _she did_.

She said them, laid her heart out in the middle of the room, in between her sisters and the revenants and the curse and every other shitty thing she’d had going on in her life. If anything, there was a small weight that had been lifted off of her chest when she said them. A sort of complexity that she’d done away with because the words _I love you_ were simpler than people were led to believe. And she did. She’d loved Nicole, despite having never thought about it before. She had known she’d liked her, sure, but she had thought it was a daring step out onto a tightrope to go that extra level and say she loved her so soon. When she did it, though, when she took that step, she realized just how foolish she had been, for even if she fell off of the tightrope, Nicole would be there to catch her.

Waverly harbored some pretty bad experiences with heights in her past, starting with being forced to walk across a beam in the barn at the age of four. She grew up terrified of them. Of what would happen should she slip. She wasn’t so afraid of them anymore.

Again, Nicole shifted, snuggling closer so her face was ever so lightly brushing Waverly’s stomach. Her long legs were drawn in close, and her hand that was gripping Waverly’s wrist tightened its hold. She made some incomprehensible, sleepy mumble before settling back down and slumbering again. Waverly couldn’t help the small smile that pulled at her lips, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

_Why do I love you?_

A complicated question, perhaps, but also just as simple as stepping out onto that tightrope with full confidence that she’d be there, waiting, should Waverly ever fall. It was no more complex, really, than the morning breeze whispering happily amongst the dew-covered grass in the spring or the prominent dimple in Nicole’s left cheek when she smiled real big. It was a beautiful question in the right voice, and truthfully, Waverly thought that her voice was alright enough to work.

There was no telling which way the wind would blow every day, or which death-defying deity would get the smart idea to mess with the Earp sisters. Waverly was coming to learn that there was much more that she couldn’t plan than she could. She was driving blind, and that terrified her more than anything, but it wasn’t so scary with her rock, her constant, her love, right beside her, because it made her feel that if she was steering in the wrong direction, a gentle hand would reach over to correct her and put her back on path towards destiny and salvation and complexity and simplicity, wrapped up into one never-ending road.

Maybe it was a leap she took when she kissed Nicole in the sheriff’s office, but damn, was she glad she knew how to fly. It was almost ironic how you could go your whole life living content on the ground because you were too cowardly to even see if you _could_ fly. You just assumed that you weren’t the kind of person meant for such greatness, and there was no force in the world that could change it.

Of course, there was.

Love.

Waverly smiled tenderly down at Nicole’s sleeping form and began to run her fingers through silky auburn hair again. There was no doubt in her mind that she loved her.

After all, it wasn’t such a hard thing, maybe.

**Author's Note:**

> Every single thing I denied earlier is true.
> 
> Hope everyone enjoyed :)


End file.
